HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

We use 3PAR to separate certain parts of our infrastructure. For example, we can decide which portion of our data will be stored on SSD's and which will be stored on disc drives. We have a flexible contract with HP in order to do this, and it's been a huge advantage for us.

It makes us more flexible because we can extend our storage size easily. But the most important advantage, again, is our flexible contract with HP. It's a technically wonderful product, but it's also wonderful because of the contract. We have no CapEx and no long-term investment on the contract because we're paying just a monthly rate.

We're satisfied with the existing solution, but we are still having discussions to improve something.

We're not missing anything in terms of hardware, but the firmware could be improved.

We've always deployed them without any issues.

It's a stable solution and there's global support from the entire HP worldwide organization.

It's very easy to scale.

We have a very close relationship with our account manager and they offer us technical support.

3PAR is less costly than our previous solution. We were able to migrate from EVA to 3PAR.

Of course it's complex, but with HP's help it made the setup easier.

We didn't evaluate other options because we've been with HP for many years now. We have 25 locations worldwide and we needed a global flash-storage solution. HP, also a global company, was the right fit.

The biggest pro is the overall performance. Provisioning is easy and fast. With NetApp, we needed to run scripts, which was a much slower process.

In general, it’s been such a good fit for us, as it's fast, easy, and flexible.

Our biggest one was the overall performance. Our SQL servers are performing better now, and because it’s easy to provision, more team members can provision who weren’t comfortable doing so before hand.

It’s been very stable. In comparison to what we had before, it’s a 10/10 -- incredibly stable.

It’s very scalable.

Pretty good. Up there with a 10/10 so far. The few issues we had were resolved quickly.

We were using NetApp. We were seeing overall poor performance.

Straightforward. Wasn’t overly complex.

Major players, such as EMC. We felt HP was a better fit. We weighed it out and HP fit our needs better than EMC.

We were looking mainly for IOPS. We have a lot of SQL, so IOPS was important to us. We also wanted tiering to move things in-between tiers easily.

Come to the shows and get demos. Get your hands on it.

• Reliability
• Support
• Flash storage - I wish we were using it

We have not had a moment's down time.

I would like it to be greener, with a lower power draw and generating less heat. That is not a comment on a problem with this SAN, it's something I look for in any hardware additions.

It entered into production in July 2012.

Nothing unexpected.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It's fine, no issues.

Two years ago it was 9/10. Now, perhaps it's 7/10. The quality is still excellent but, like many other vendors, the primary support is on the other side of the world, and there is a time zone issue. We will schedule a patch and I'll see an email or a phone message that came in between midnight and three AM, with a question. You lose a day replying, because the engineers don't call with questions during normal business hours in the Central Time zone. This is not an issue if you run a night staff.

We also previously used NetApp and Xiotech, and switched to 3PAR as HP presented a solution that addressed performance, scalability, and, I'm told, it was cost effective.

The HP setup spreadsheet is a beast. It's much more extensive than any previous SAN, but going through the process addresses almost every issue that's likely to come up.

We were guided through this process by Sayers Consulting. They were outstanding, especially Bill Tohtz and Dean Flatland.

Yes, we looked at several presentations.

Set time aside to go through the setup spreadsheet.

The CPG, Dynamic / Adaptive Optimization, the CLI, and more importantly the way it's licensed as you are not "tagged" and held hostage when you're at 1TB, and another, and another, and another. The licensing is a brilliant approach to the fiscal tourniquet of scalability! Oh.. I also like the service processor and how it's out of band and monitors the SAN, how it does the updates - neat little component.

Scaling and performance. Easy to add shelves, easy to move data around while everything is hot, move data from tier to tier, expanding a LUN, there are so many ways it's just amazing how much it's helped! The snapshot and sending them to different tiers by using the CPG makes life a bit easier!

Removing a LUN mapping from a single host is a bit odd, worse a single host in a host set, it needs 10G ports for IP based replication (needs to be 1 or 10G). Keep working on the SSMC and allow for GUI management to be cross platform.

Around 2 years

I have deployed several and found the SmartStart CD to be intermittent. Also, during the install when the SP locates the array, the network based multicast can't find the storage array and you have to go to console / serial cable. Not too big of a deal, but you then have to configure settings manually.

Never as of yet. It has been rock solid!

We can't hit it hard enough yet. As I said adding shelves and drives all is pretty nice and straight forward.

Early on, I had some strong opinions about the transition to more of HP support. I raised concerns, The HP team in Alpharetta, Ga lead by Brad Bates took significant steps, listened, and made adjustments. Buying a product is one thing, post-sale is what keeps customers coming back and maintains longevity.

Thus far, pretty impressive. I met the actual teams of people and after the initial "hiccup", I had a chance to see the HP Lab, meet some of the people that enjoy what they do. It's important for everyone to understand that IT people work inverse hours and when we make changes it's evenings, weekends, and holidays. Senior level - tenured members of most companies are "off" while HP found a way to keep solid individuals available to be available.

Funny you ask - let's just say a "no named" array that had redundant controllers completely torched nearly every ESX datastore where it "gutted" the data inside of it, but left the shell. Yet, the support person on the phone called the update "successful on my end". Sure, the nodes made have updated, but the data was gone - you be the judge! I have used solutions from many, many storage vendors.

Pretty straightforward - even though HP says "self installable" I highly recommend a qualified person with a great deal of understanding of virtualization, zoning, etc. Could a person with no experience using storage do this? Eh...maybe getting the array on-line, but I would not recommend it (nor would I for any vendor).

Well, I am "that vendor team", but I am also a user as well. So, if I am allowed to rate my experience - 25 years of IT, nearly 15 years of storage - we can do pretty well!!

The usual EMC stuff.

Whether you are new to storage or advanced, this is the most amazing piece of hardware I have ever had my hands on, built, and used. The thought behind much of the detail of how it works just seems incredible. Think about this, you have drives that sit in multiple RAID arrays because of the CPGs and how the SAN is always moving chunklets around to keep hot spots from occurring. If I could meet the founders and shake their hand, I would love to and let them know thank you. Thank you for giving me the chance to have fun with my job and have access to such hardware. I would also thank HP for taking a datacenter class piece of hardware and re-aligning it to be competitive in any space - just brilliant!

We primarily use the solution for storage.

We are satisfied with the solution. We deployed 3PAR in the national and international markets. It's not bad, the solution.   

It's not a very good solution. We found EMC and other storage solutions can help the client a bit more in terms of reaching their target, having the flexibility they need, and offering better backups and integration.

It's not high-end storage. It's not as strong as it needs to be. You need to have two nodes, or two controls to be able to effectively protect from data loss.

It's not really a complete solution. It has some limitations with software integration as well as backup and restore integration. It does not protect the data stored on 3PAR. Some products should be protected with another brand if there's a level of security required. 

With 3PAR, there is remote copy software which isn't very good. It should be improved also. Many times we have had data issues and we have had to re-initiate the application and reconfigure. 

HPE is not present in Algeria. They manage support through the delivery partner that actually can provide some assistance. Right now, we have spare part problem. It's not present. We have to wait, maybe, a couple of weeks or more than one month to have a replacement get shipped in and we're usually reaching out about that. It is a big issue for the customer if we lose one server, or the blade is down. It means the service can be down for one month, and it's not a good idea to share this information with customers. 

Before 2015, HPE had some sort of setup with DHL or FedEx. It was very good. On top of that, they had an HPE engineer to manage the support. However, since then, they left. They closed the office and they manage everything now indirectly in the country, via other countries. If we try to measure the performance of HPE outside our country, it's very good, however, here, we have had a bad experience with them and so have our customers as well as local customers.

I've also dealt with Dell EMC. We have Huawei OceanStore Dorado, PowerMax, and PowerStore as well. We have all the kind of storage. I can confirm that 3PAR is not a high-end solution. It can be classified as the mid-range, not high-end. PowerStore is likely the best out of all of these. The controller is really high-end.

We don't really handle the setup. It's done at the factory and delivered. It comes with data sheets to help customers with a few things, however, for the most part, it is pre-setup to spec. Once it is delivered it can be configured as necessary.

The pricing is expensive. I'm not sure if it's the region that causes such high prices, however, when we are bidding, we rarely get very good discounts to work with. It's not competitive. 

We are a reseller. 

Whether or not this solution would work for a company is all about the situation. If HPE could improve the level of the support or if the company has a certain level of support available to them (instead of relying on HPE), they can likely manage. It's a good idea to secure some spare parts in advance while making a deal. However, relying on the HPE SLA with the worry of indirect logistics is going to be a problem for a lot of companies when it takes so long to get parts. I

Our company has a contract with the client - not HPE. Therefore, it looks bad on us when we can't deliver on the parts or service when the fault lies on the HPE end. 

Overall, I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. It's not bad, however, there are significant areas that need to be improved upon. 

We use it mostly for databases and file share. 

I like that 3PAR can remake the disk online. That's one of the best features because when we first started, that was the best. The team provisioning feature was also a good one. Those features are the best for me, provisioning and online optimization, and the tier you can have for storage.

Cloud integration could be better. They can also add an NVMe to port to that. I would like to see NVMe in the next release. That's the future or the near future for storage. That will give us a real high throughput and some performance.

I have been working with HPE 3PAR StoreServ for about ten years or since the beginning when the product was in the market.

It's quite stable. The only problem that I have found with this product is when you are missing storage space. When you lack storage space, and the disk is full is when you have most of the problems with this product. But if you don't have these issues, you'll almost never have a problem with it.

Scalability could be better. I think it's getting short right now, and another product has more scalability. This product, I think, is medium if that's acceptable. I don't know how to measure it.

I think it's excellent. I actually think they are very good.

The initial setup is easy. It takes between two to four hours to upload the functions.

It's a good price.

If you want to run this solution, I would say that this product is mostly dying from my point of view. If you're my customer, I would recommend not to buy a 3PAR because there are a lot of new products. I would recommend Nimble, depending on the size, or a Primera if they need a really big solution. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give HPE 3PAR StoreServ a seven.

The primary use case of this solution is for clusters, database work (Oracle and MySQL), and storage.

An area of improvement for this solution is an increase in the bandwidth as well as an upgrade of the storage functionality and capabilities. The storage needs to be expandable for future-proofing.

An additional feature I would like to see in the next release is for the management interface not to depend on Java.

I have been using the solution for three and a half years.

The solution is easy to use and very stable.

The solution is scalable, but we required an extension.

The technical support is very good.

Previously, I used EMC VNX. We switched because we couldn't monitor anything unless we uploaded a data file to EMC and they send us back an analysis.

The installation of the solution required three people and took three days, but for the storage-side, it took eight hours to get running.

We use 3PAR as our centralized storage for database use, mostly. It's also data stores for our VMs. We have a few Oracle Databases running on 3PAR and we have our production VMs running on 3PAR, as well.

Before using centralized storage, we needed to make sure that we have enough physical disks installed in a server. Now, we know exactly the capacity that we need for the upcoming year, and it's much easier for us to enlarge the capacity and expose these disk volumes to the relevant servers. Again, in our case, it's mostly the databases.

All-flash positions our organization for growth in a way, mostly for performance, because again, we're using all-flash for the performance that it provides, and we have critical databases running on it. It's providing day-to-day functionality, the way I see it.

• The ease of use, from one perspective
• The centralized storage
• The ease of copying, backing up, and moving data from one server to the other

I would like to see more visibility regarding issues - active alerting. I know that InfoSight is currently trying to do what Nimble did for its storage. If it were proactively alerting regarding maintenance or something that's going to go bust, it could be very useful for us.

All in all, it's a stable solution. From an availability perspective, we have it in both data centers. 

We found one huge bug when we implemented the solution, a critical bug that eventually crashed and shut down the storage, which is something that we cannot live with. But since then, a patch was provided for this issue, and over the last a year-and-a-half we haven't had any stability issues whatsoever.

The scalability is problematic. We would like to scale with our current infrastructure but we can't. We need to actually buy additional components, not just add disks. We actually need to buy additional controllers and, eventually, another storage unit. So it's not good enough.

The technical support is not good. Usually, when we have a problem, it takes ages until we get a response. We need to escalate several times, using HPE and the partner in Israel to make sure that we get the appropriate response. Usually, what we know or what we find out right away, is the same response that we get from support a week or two later - that something is happening. And only a month after that do we get a good solution that we can do something with.

From a technical perspective, we understood the benefits of having centralized storage. From that point on we looked for what was supposed to be the right solution for us. Eventually, we zeroed in on the 3PAR solution and not the competition.

The initial setup was complex. It's not a straightforward integration. There are a lot of parameters that you need to configure, and each parameter affects a lot of other things. Even though we used a partner for the implementation, after the installation in the data center we needed to rebuild everything and reconfigure everything several times. At the beginning, it wasn't good. Now we are stable so, except for the performance issue, everything is working as we expect it to work.

We used an integrator. The guys are great, responsible. They did what they were supposed to do. They worked with HPE regarding the sizing of the storage solution, and it seems like someone there didn't do his job correctly. I don't know if it was HPE or the partner. But eventually, we had a problem.

It's a much more expensive solution than just buying local disks. On the other hand, it provides us a centralized point of management for all our storage. I can't tell you the exact ROI, but the simplicity and the centralization of the storage probably provide us with some kind of a return.

We looked at NetApp. We also evaluated hyperconverged solutions like Nutanix, but it was not relevant at the time. And we were approached by HPE regarding SimpliVity but it was not relevant as well, at the time.

We went with 3PAR because, at the time, we were convinced that this would provide us the solution that we need, from several KPIs that we were looking at. We were promised performance that we didn't get in the end.

Check the performance and every technical aspect that you can, as much as you can. Don't trust anyone else telling you otherwise. Test everything yourself.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using this solution is that having centralized storage is the right way to go and that sizing is everything. If you don't do the sizing right and you don't understand every detail of the product, how it works, you can be in a very unpleasant situation when you pay half a million dollars and you have a product that does not work as you expected.

What every IT guy will tell you is that we disable the dedupe, mostly because of the hit on the performance. Regarding InfoSight predictive analytics, we tried to use it. It was not that predictive because it doesn't give as much information as we were told. We had actually turned it on and we had a few critical issues but we got no alerts from InfoSight regarding them.

It increased performance for a while, but then, as we grew, and we did not grow significantly, performance dropped down. For a few of our critical, online systems, we went back to using the physical disks and not the centralized storage.

It was supposed to improve throughput but it was not enough, not as much as we were told before we bought the product.

We have talked about using the flex-capacity offering, HPE GreenLake, but we haven't used it yet.

From our experience, I would rate low, but I don't want to rate it low because from a technical perspective, it's a stable solution, it works. I would give the product a seven out of ten, even though our experience has not been that good. A seven is fair at this point.